This game traumatized child me, too young to understand the mechanics I alienated my crush, got my animals dead and my Farmer got depression.

and im not joking.

ill come back for the remake maybe

I love the game's (slightly) gritty tone, and how realistic some of the mechanics are, such as you having to impregnate your cow before it produce milk. The idea of a farming sim going on until your character literally dies of old age is fascinating. But the characters are extremely shallow and there's not much to actually do. By the start of Year 3 I got to the point where I achieved everything notable...and there's 10 years total to go through.

The devs knew they screwed up because later re-releases reduced the amount of in-game years to 6 & added more unlockables. I might play one of those rereleases but not anytime soon. If you're reading this, get the 2023 remake. Yes, it's uglier but it's worth the trade-off.

I remember not liking this game very much.

Granted, I grew up with HM64 and fell in love with the series. In that game, there was so much to do every single day, it would compel you to play into the next day. This feedback loop is very addicting in this way and I think it's what got so many people hooked on Stardew Valley today.

AWL is sloooow. The days are fewer and longer, but there is also just as much to do because everything else takes longer. Planting takes longer, feeding and caring animals takes longer, mining and scavenging takes longer, and the commute around town takes longer. This game does not respect your time and wants you to slow down, which would be good if it meant it ultimately amounted to something. But it kinda just...doesn't? Once you play past a certain amount of time in the game, there really isn't that much to do anymore. I know that's the case for every Harvest Moon, it's pretty much endless and at some point you just run out of stuff to do and then you just stop playing. But AWL hits that wall a lot harder and sooner. It goes without saying though, I never beat it either, despite the fact it actually does have an ending.

Some mechanics are just bizarre for a HM game too. You NEED to eat to have enough energy to do anything in the game, but the game won't tell you except for your characters own animations (that also takes up time). Getting milk from cows works the same way in real life, so you have to keep making your cow pregnant so it keeps making milk for longer than a year. You have limited barn space, so only a certain amount of cows can be kept before you have to start selling them. The game gives you a goat that's only good for 1 year too, but it only gives you 1 and no means to get more, so you just have to get rid of it I guess. Lol You're only limited to 3 bachelorette choices, which pales in comparison to just about every other HM and Stardew. They've all got distinct personalities, but if you don't really like any of them well then that's too damn bad cuz you gotta marry somebody before your first year of the game! Almost no holidays also keeps the town feeling less lively.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy some aspects of it though. Its outdoor atmosphere is greater than almost ever other HM (aside from 64). It's a more mature and realistic feeling HM compared to the more colorful and anime HMs, especially compared to the later titles. The game also has a surprising sense of humor to it too that other HMs are just too cutesy to even dare try. It's visually distinct and dared to be different in a series that eventually got way too cozy with it's formula.

So yeah, that's a 3 from me.

I felt like I played this game wrong. I was not earning much and seemingly my horse succumbed into an eternal depression.

It was a good farming experience overall. There was enough things to do to keep you busy. Some events were quite slow at times, but that's the rural farming life for you.

If there was a true ending to this game, I never got to the end of it.

Review in progress:
I spent a lot of time playing this game as a child. Looking back, it was rather disappointing. Playing Friends of Mineral Town and Stardew Valley after this made me realize that I grew up with the wrong farming game.

The balance is laughably bad. Once you get access to fruit trees, there's no point in even bothering with other revenue streams. You make such an absurd amount of money that taking care of animals and standard crops is no longer worth the trouble. There's almost nothing to spend your money on though, so you'll quickly find yourself at a point where there's no incentive to farm... in a farming game.

Stamina is effectively a nonissue in this game (it exists, but you can't pass out anymore) and there are no power berries (which increase said stamina). Power berries acted as a compelling goal for players to work toward and added structure to what can otherwise feel like an aimless game. Removing the threat that comes along with low stamina greatly reduces the challenge factor. Both of these changes make the gameplay feel more dull.

Festivals in A Wonderful Life are terrible. There are only four of them, and all you do is watch a cutscene. Other Harvest Moon games have larger variety of festivals and the festivals have actual gameplay. There's nothing here to break up the monotony inherent to farming games.

The atmosphere and writing in A Wonderful Life have always stuck with me. They are the strongest aspects of the game by far. There's an overwhelming sense of melancholy that pervades throughout Forgot Me Not Valley. Nearly every characters is struggling, and none of them truly get past their issues. It makes the villagers feel like real people.

Those villager interactions are what kept the game from being a complete slog. Unfortunately, it doesn't take long to burn through their dialogue and social events. I wanted to learn more about the characters, but there simply wasn't enough writing added for each one.

Becoming friends with everyone is a quick and easy process. It can easily be done within the first 20 days or so even without gifts. There's very little incentive to talk to villagers after this point, which is a shame. Most of them give you poor rewards or nothing at all. I'd consider getting more dialogue and events to be a sufficient reward, but that doesn't happen here.

Cooking is useless. Why would I cook food when stamina doesn't matter and gift giving is unnecessary? Fishing also ends up being unneeded because of those factors plus the aforementioned broken economy. Tool upgrades no longer require materials and can instead be purchased with money. This means that there's no reason to mine, either.

I’m not a country boy, but sometimes I like to pretend I am one.

If it’s not Red Dead Redemption, then it’s probably Harvest Moon. I’ve played a few, although they’ve mostly been superseded by Stardew Valley these days (as I imagine is the case for many others). Even still, I have a soft spot for the early days of the franchise, especially the original and Harvest Moon 64. They feel cozy in a way that is close to what Animal Crossing does for me, even if Harvest Moon demands a bit more out of you. A Wonderful Life is… Different. One of my most vivid memories of the game is of me staying up until 5AM because I just kept saying “one more day”, wanting to move on to the next chapter of the game as soon as possible and see what was lying in store. There was a certain appeal to it – something about this particular entry in the series felt a little more real to me, and I think that definitely helped keep my attention. No other game I’d played up to that point had quite managed to make me feel like I was living my own adult life, with responsibilities and consequences for my actions. The antithesis to Animal Crossing, if you will, although not in the same way Animal Crossing is to The Sims.

Well, I got older, and got to experience a lot of what Harvest Moon was seemingly preparing me for first-hand. Video games are still very much a hobby of mine – obviously – but enjoying them now means balancing them with my real life responsibilities. Recently I’ve been taking a bit of a stroll down Memory Lane, trying out games from my childhood to see how well they hold up in the modern era. That can be a dangerous endeavor, though. There’s nothing quite like taking a turn down a familiar alley, only to realize that your childhood innocence might have blinded you from comprehending exactly what was happening there back then.

This is basically my second time writing this review. When I first sat down to put one together, I was prepared to utterly rip into A Wonderful Life. As you can probably tell by the score, I’m still not altogether fond of it. Compared to the games that came before it and even the ones that released contemporaneously, it’s noticeably lacking in several aspects. With that said, I was prepared to hit it with my verdict based on that and that alone. I had no intention of playing through it to the end, because I just was not having enough fun to justify it… But I ended up doing it anyways. I felt that it would be unfair to drag this game without at least completing it once and braced myself for the long road ahead. As I powered through it, I was forced to reevaluate a lot of its aspects and ultimately came out on the other end with a more positive opinion of it, even if I still think it’s mediocre at its absolute best. It does have its strengths, however – ones that arguably no other Harvest Moon or Story of Seasons game does, and probably are a large part of why this particular title seems to be so fondly remembered.

I’m going to go ahead and start by outlining the issues I have with this game, of which there are many. There’s a good chance this will be the longest review I’ve written up to this point, so if you favor brevity, you may want to pass on this one. I’m also going to be spoiling its ending, so keep that in mind.

Let’s get the most minor of all out of the way: The game does not take advantage of the fact it’s on the Gamecube whatsoever. Forget-Me-Not Valley does a decent job of instilling that quiet village vibe, but while this vale can be quite charming at the right time of day, the overall low-quality visuals mar its natural beauty. The one outdoor area that you’re limited to is sparsely utilized and suffers from a not insignificant amount of pop-in. Animations are stilted and slow, with characters sometimes taking far too long to slip something into their pocket or sliding across the ground when entering buildings. You’ll feel it the worst as you play and your character takes a full two seconds or more just to perform the most basic of actions. If the goal was to force you to slow down and take things in, there are assuredly better ways of doing it. But the game isn’t ugly. It just doesn’t hold up terrifically well, especially when set alongside some of its contemporaries.

For the game itself: The first chapter is an absolutely abysmal introduction to A Wonderful Life. None of the things that make this game enjoyable to play are present in it. For starters, your character behaves as if he’s never done a day of physical labor in his whole life. He gets winded very easily early on and can’t get much work done without being interrupted by overly long animations of him keeling over or having dizzy spells. Beginning the game relatively weak isn’t new to the series, but it’s especially noteworthy here due to how much of a hassle getting tired is, and how much easier it is to become tired. Basically everything you can do in the game takes a slight toll on your stamina, up to and including filling a watering can and walking. Yes, that casual stroll our hero takes as he moves from one end to the next of this small town is slowly but surely wearing him out. To top it all off, there’s also a hunger mechanic you need to contend with. If you don’t eat on a regular basis, your character will be further weakened, alongside having yet more interruptions as he occasionally stops to rub his nuisance of a growling stomach. “No sweat,” you may say to yourself. “It shouldn’t be too hard to keep myself fed.” But even that is more of a pain than it ought to be. Despite being an agrarian society, nobody actually sells produce or food in Forget-Me-Not Valley besides you. Not the traveling merchant, and not even the farm next door or the inn across the way. You obviously won’t be producing much of anything besides milk (thanks for the free cow, Takakura) until your first harvest comes in, which means picking the edible plants that grow in the valley and cramming them down your throat to stay fed. It’s either that or spending a portion of your free time fishing – do yourself a favor and buy the rod (and brush) from Van at the nearest available opportunity. Cooking is a non-starter, too, because even though you have a kitchen, you’re not going to have the ingredients to make many recipes until at least the end of the year – and you have to cook a certain number of meals to unlock the lion’s share of recipes, even if you know how to make them otherwise. So life is tough enough with all of that in mind, but there are now changes to farming itself that makes it more tedious to interact with. In the original game and Harvest Moon 64, a single bag of seeds would scatter over nine squares, making planting crops a quick process once the field was prepared. In A Wonderful Life, each bag of seeds can be used to sow… A single square. So on top of needing to till each individual square of farmland, you also need to individually plant crops in each square as well. That obviously drags out the process a fair bit longer than usual, but what’s more, you’re now expected to water plants twice per day in order to maximize the rate at which they grow (or at least that’s what you’re told). You’re tired and you’re struggling to tend to all these damn plants, but the final nail in the coffin is that it’s barely worth it in the first place. The first and most grating problem is that standard crops, even at the highest grade of quality, barely turn a profit compared to previous titles. This is ostensibly to incentivize hybridization, a new feature that allows you to create more profitable varieties of crops… Which you won’t have access to until at least the second chapter. The other issue is that none of the crops (discounting fruit trees) are renewable. In previous games, crops like tomatoes and corn would continue to produce through their season, which – aside from just making sense in the case of tomatoes – let you establish a stable source of income in return for taking longer to mature. There are more varieties of crops you can grow in A Wonderful Life, but all of them produce a single item a single time before needing to be hacked down and replaced. All said and done, you can use what you grow to feed yourself (and cook basic recipes once you accrue a decent variety) and perhaps as gifts, but you’re not going to make yourself a decent nest egg off of farming any time soon. This leaves you in an awkward position where livestock will appear to be a far more lucrative option despite the prohibitively high investment required - but more on that later. Ultimately, there’s very little room for you to develop your farm in any meaningful way during the first year of gameplay. This leaves you with little to do in the meantime except to befriend the townsfolk and perhaps strive to find yourself a partner. And yet…

The cast of characters you can meet, while having charming enough designs, have depressingly wooden personalities. You can probably guess at what each one is like simply by looking at them (I don’t recommend taking this approach in real life). By and large, they follow static schedules and pull from pitifully shallow pools of dialogue, getting a handful of lines in each season that mostly boil down to talking about the weather or asking about your farm. Sometimes they even share generic reactions with one another verbatim. It’s an issue that’s never fully resolved, but it’s even worse this early in the game, as your interactions with them will be frequent enough that they will start to sound like broken records very quickly. You’re not going to have much difficulty getting along with them, either. Characters in Harvest Moon usually have a fairly well-defined list of likes and dislikes, which means you’ll have to puzzle out what their favorites are if you want to make any real progress at winning them over. In this game, start plucking the myriad flowers that sprout around the valley and hand them out. Half of them will love you in no time. The rest won’t take much longer to solve – there’s only so many items in the game. And at the end of the day, I doubt you’ll want to get terribly close to them anyways. A few characters, like Daryl and Murray, are at least fun for the humor they bring to the experience. The rest of the cast just doesn’t have much going for them, and not all of them even have the benefit of additional scenes that let you see more of them besides their daily dialogue. A significant portion of this can assuredly be attributed to what seems to be a fairly poor translation job, but I don’t have much reason to believe the writing is especially noteworthy even in the original Japanese. This even extends to your available partners, who are arguably one of the bigger selling points in Harvest Moon. Never mind that you’re down to three bachelorettes from the standard five, but they don’t say or do much of anything interesting outside of their heart events – and they’re not at all difficult to woo, either. It’s telling that among the three, most people who prefer Nami cite liking her because she’s aloof (read: isn’t nice to a fault) and can’t be impressed by just shoving random flowers in her face. Even still, she’s far easier to get close to than that might imply. At least there’s no real obligation to get hitched… Which is what I would say if this were any other Harvest Moon game.

You have to get married by the end of the first chapter. You have no choice! If you don’t pursue a partner, one of the bachelorettes will storm your property (at least one of them straight up busts into your house) and more or less strongarm you into proposing. Even if you went out of your way to avoid so much as speaking to any of them! If you turn them down, your character ultimately ends up abandoning the farm… For no particular reason, outside of an implication that not wanting to start a family on the farm must mean you have some other goal in life. Game over. Getting married and starting a family certainly was a big part of previous Harvest Moon games, but you’ve never been forced to marry before now. The ending of the SNES original has additional scenes that not only show you could live a happy single life, but even acknowledge if you have high affection with each of the bachelorettes in spite of being single. This railroading is decidedly lame, especially since the anemic characterizations have no time to thicken out in the space of a single year, and thus you might not particularly feel like marrying anybody just yet. But it isn’t as annoying as it might be otherwise, for two reasons: Firstly, people who play Harvest Moon seldom ever drag their feet on getting married; provided you don’t intend on avoiding it altogether, most would probably strive to get that entry on their bucket list crossed off ASAP. Secondly, and this is a big one – the game is built around wedded life. I’ll talk about all of that more towards the end, but this is very much a deliberate design choice. A Wonderful Life wants you married at the earliest available opportunity because it can’t tell the story it wants to if you don’t.

A lot of these issues get ironed out a bit more in the second chapter and beyond, and in some cases even by the end of the first if you already know what to expect. Your character does become more suited to farm life and can eventually go through a full day of non-stop work without much struggle. You can get a horse as early as the first summer, which not only lets you cover significantly more ground in a short period of time, but also prevents tiring out from running around. There’s basically zero excuse to not be friends with everybody in the village by the time the second year rolls in, and at least some of them will give you gifts that will make your life a little easier going forward (although the one tool that would be a substantial upgrade – a watering can that can water multiple spaces at once - doesn’t work properly in the original Gamecube version, so thanks for nothing Romana). Once hybridization is unlocked, you can start developing crops that will make you considerably more money and let you cook more recipes. Naturally, characters start having a bit more to say the later in the game you are, and that’s before factoring in your life with your spouse and child. Overall, you have more options and the game starts to feel a bit more full – but everything that comes after still lives in the shadow of that first year, and not everything about the complete AWL experience is especially joyful to begin with.

There’s just so many other irksome qualities that drive me up the wall about A Wonderful Life. One big one is the way animals are handled. Chickens and sheep are fine and work exactly the way you would expect. Feed them, care for them, gather materials from them. Then there’s cows. In some misguided attempt at realism, Marvelous made dealing with them as irritating as possible. For the most part, they behave much the same as the other animals. However, cows now produce less and less milk over the course of an in-game year (again, forty days) and then stop giving milk altogether. To get them to start producing again, you’ll need to engage in breeding, and after the cow gives birth to a new calf it can be milked once more. The process is long and bothersome, requiring you to either have a mature bull to potentially initiate breeding, or to pay a not-insubstantial amount of money for a Miracle Potion. Then, once the cow has been impregnated, you’ll need to care for it in much the usual way, and then you’ll need to take care of the calf until it reaches maturity itself. Seeding to birth takes just north of 30 days at bare minimum: The better part of a year. The calf itself will take a further 30 days to mature. And if you were hoping to increase production via that calf (assuming it’s a female) or wanted to skip the whole process by simply purchasing a new cow, tough luck. New heifers are subject to the same rules and will not produce any milk until they have given birth. And yes, you’ll need to repeat this process once your first cow inevitably stops producing again. On the one hand, cows are highly profitable in this game and so having them require a bit more investment on your part makes sense. On the other hand – what the funk. It wouldn’t be so jarring if any of the other systems were changed to match this level of tedium – not that I would want them to be – but it sticks out like a sore thumb compared to how straightforward animal husbandry is otherwise. And beyond these three, all of the other animals you can own just feel like afterthoughts. The dog can’t be interacted with in any meaningful way. You can’t play with it or even show it affection the way you can with the other animals. You don’t even have to feed it – it will never get sick or even sad, and there isn’t even a practical reason other than it can apparently prevent food being stolen from your storage (not a problem if you keep it all in your fridge starting from the second chapter, or even just in your rucksack, and I’ve seen nothing to substantiate this anyways). Ditto for the cat you can receive. The horse doesn’t fare much better, barely requiring any kind of upkeep – which is probably for the best, since it’s hands down the most useful animal you own. I'm also fairly certain it has narcolepsy. The goat is a scam. Just don’t even think about it. And the only other ones, ducks, can be received for free if you have a pond on your farm (an “upgrade” that is completely pointless if not for this). They are functionally just chickens with a higher sell price in exchange for requiring you to keep the pair you receive in order to keep producing ducks. Since chickens have their own unique benefits over ducks, you may as well just sell the ducks to recoup part of the cost of that pond and keep raising chickens.

None of the other systems work particularly well, either. Again, farming basic crops is barely worth it from a monetary perspective, especially when you factor in that developing high-quality crops requires you to purchase large quantities of fertilizer (and to have a seed maker to further propagate them). This is a huge profit-killer early on. Once you finally unlock hybridization, actually interacting with it is a bit of a chore due to how annoying the associated NPC can be. Your newly-hybridized crop is subject to all of the same aches and pains that regular crop farming requires, and demands being planted in more fertile soil to thrive. You can help alleviate a lot of this by mixing plants with certain varieties of flowers, which makes some of these headaches more tolerable. However, once you eventually reach a point where you’re turning a decent profit, you’re likely to ask yourself if it was all worth the hassle. Raising hybrid crops through multiple generations requires a bit of foresight and planning, and while that’s probably going to be a plus for the right person, the payoff is terrifically underwhelming. The only thing all of this effort gets you besides money is the ability to finally make the final chunk of the available recipes, which all inexplicably require hybrid crops in spite of the dishes not being particularly exotic. I can’t think of a good reason to make them all, anyways, as there’s nothing these recipes can do that the simple ones can’t. Tree seeds are expensive and have a long growing period but produce fruit throughout their active season once they’re fully mature. You can fertilize and hybridize these as well, and the fruit will make you an alright profit over time… But that isn’t really the reason anybody grows them. Instead, you can use the seed maker to make seeds from the fruit (duh) and they sell for more than ten times the value of the fruit, likely because they’re no different than the ones you can purchase yourself. This was obviously unintended and was nerfed in later releases of the game, but even if it’s an oversight, it’s still a part of the game and thus there’s no reason not to utilize it.

Then, what do you do? There are a few viable ways to make money in this game (up to and including abusing glitches) and the methods that require the most time and effort seldom outstrip the others. And hell, if you absolutely don’t want to do anything else, you can probably get by just picking junk up off of the ground, fishing, or digging things out of the mines and bringing them to Van on sale days. It will take time to accrue a decent sum, but you have nothing but time in this game.

I can just keep going. There’s so many things that this game lacks compared to its predecessors (or even its concurrent GBA title, Friends of Mineral Town), and the things that are there all come with some kind of caveat. Forget-Me-Not Valley is small and barren and there’s nothing to explore. There’s no side areas like the mountains of the previous games, and the ruins here can’t be delved into like the mines – they expand horizontally as the years go by, but otherwise, what you see is what you get. Again, there’s less dialogue, less events and optional scenes, and less potential partners than in 64. Characters don’t even have birthdays. There are no festivals, with the things the game calls festivals basically being short cutscenes where nothing fun or interesting happens. The seasons are only ten days long; surely, they could have done something to help fill out the empty space. There’s maybe one or two minigames that aren’t exactly the type you’d ever want to come back to. Hell, there’s barely even any music! Outside, anyways - the soundtrack as a whole is admittedly pretty catchy and varied. However, the standard seasonal themes aren’t here, at least in the traditional sense. You can unlock a variety of records to play on your farm, which you’ll hear as long as you’re on your property, but as soon as you step foot into town all you have is the sounds of nature. Some people will probably appreciate this more minimalistic approach, but for me it makes the soundscape depressingly barren. Of course, not helping things is the fact that the vast majority of the records in the game require you to link your game with Friends of Mineral Town… And I’m not even going to get into how underwhelming that whole system is. There’s no real reason why the bonuses you get from it couldn’t have just been incorporated into the game proper, especially given how light on content it is to begin with.

They even managed to make fishing suck. There’s an awkward half-second you have to wait when the bobber goes down or you won’t hook the fish. I’m like 90% sure that wasn’t intentional. Mate, Animal Crossing is right there, how can you fail the test when you could just cheat off of its paper?

Yeah, it has some problems. So what else does this game have?

Well, as you may already be aware, Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life differs from its kin insofar as it wants the turning of the years to mean something. The game is divided into multiple chapters, which can be comprised of anywhere from one to four years. Further years pass between each chapter, which obviously results in some changes. Some new characters arrive in the Valley while others move or even pass away. Adults start visibly greying, including yourself and your spouse, and by the end of the game Forget-Me-Not Valley has essentially become a glorified retirement village, with the youth of the town preparing to begin the rest of their own lives – presumably somewhere else. Naturally, your family is the focal point of all of this, and you get to watch your child mature from a toddler into a young adult. They’ll develop a personality of their own, and eventually seek to build a future for themselves, which need not necessarily involve farming. You can give them a hand with that, trying to nudge their interests in a certain direction, or giving them advice like any parent would. Meanwhile, your spouse and your other fellow villagers will reminisce on days gone, worry over the future and lament the opportunities they’ve missed. I strain to think of a game before A Wonderful Life that tackled topics like this so head-on, let alone one that I assume was aimed at a younger target audience, and I can’t think of many examples that have taken this road since. There’s even room for drama in your love life – getting too close to one of the marriage candidates and then electing to wed somebody else will lead to them giving you a (well-deserved) dressing down for playing with their hearts. Divorce is even on the table in this game: Granted you practically have to try to make it happen, but if you give up trying to run your farm, your wife will take the kid and leave forever, giving you an unceremonious ending. Other Harvest Moon games have and continue to “get real” with you from time to time, but this game feels a bit more grounded in its approach to simulating life.

Like most other aspects of this game, though, it definitely stumbles a bit in its attempt. In spite of the seemingly broad amount of time that passes (at least two decades) almost nothing about Forget-Me-Not Valley changes, aesthetically or otherwise. This can at least partly be explained due to the fact there isn’t much there for anybody in the valley to begin with, and thus it isn’t an attractive location for development, but it does make the amount of time that goes by feel rather meaningless. Exactly one character dies of old age during the length of the game, which is a bit of a shocker considering how old some of them are from the very beginning, and thus death as a topic isn’t explored quite as much as one would expect it to be. Galen and Romana, who need canes to get around town, remain completely unchanged… And somehow your animals, including the dog all seem to be incapable of aging. Crops you planted between chapters stay put and trees don’t grow a bit. Not even the grass in your field changes height. Sure, sure, it’s all in the name of keeping gameplay and story separate, but it’s immediately noticeable and weakens the façade a bit. It’s further exacerbated by the lack of variety in dialogue, as people greet you the exact same way they were years before. The world is disappointingly static, which really doesn’t do the core conceit here any good.

But even still, once you finally make it to the end, the narrative manages to be rather affecting. The game opens with you taking over your recently deceased father’s farm, and his old friend Takakura helps show you the ropes. Between chapters, he writes letters to your father’s spirit, letting him know the progress you’ve made. You get married, have a child, and do your best to make the most out of the opportunity you’ve been given. In the final chapter, your now well-wizened character shares a moment of reflection with his wife. She bemoans that she’s not the stunner she used to be. You tell her that she’s still beautiful. Soon after, you quietly pass away, with a life of hard labor seemingly having taken its toll. Your friends and family don’t even have time to say goodbye and the whole of the valley mourns your passing. The game ends much like it begins, with your child going on to pursue their dreams. Your wife does the best she can. Takakura writes one last letter, telling your father that he can rest well knowing his child lived his life to the fullest. The world keeps right on spinning. It’s a remarkably poignant ending, and I think that if you were truly invested in the experience up to then, it could be a proper punch to the gut. Your mileage may vary on that, but I appreciate what they were trying to do and I think it’s executed well, all things considered. It’s just a shame that such a thoughtful ending is wasted on an overall underwhelming game.

When all is said and done, I think what really ruins the final experience for me is that there just isn’t much of anything to strive for. Compared to other titles, there’s barely any room to develop your farm – expansions happen automatically over the years, and the list of upgrades you can purchase is astonishingly short and they require nothing more than your money. You don’t need to clear out farmland or gather materials. The cheap tool upgrades you can purchase from day one are more than enough for you to get by, although there’s really nowhere to go from there anyways. You don’t have to do any meaningful planning to be successful. You don’t have to worry about surviving through the winter, or getting shut into your house by typhoons, or having structures damaged by natural disasters, or animals disappearing overnight because you forgot to bring them inside. You barely need to worry at all. The game is toothless; even with the more mature themes and grounded world on display here, it never feels like there’s much of a point to anything. Tied in with the heavier focus on the family aspect, it’s especially egregious. What if you were made to work towards housing upgrades before you could grow your family, like in past games? What if you needed to keep a certain amount of money in the coffers or food in the fridge to keep your family safe and happy? What if you could be blindsided by unexpected life events, like your child getting sick? What if you needed to raise money to send them to school if they showed an interest in academics? There’s always what ifs, but this game really needed something to make the toil and trouble feel worthwhile – something to tie the central theme together. Never at any point did I feel like there was a purpose to my playing A Wonderful Life. I wasn’t having fun, and I wasn’t trying to achieve anything. I was just farming for farming’s sake. That’s all well and good in the other, more whimsical and game-ified titles, but here the experience feels hollow because of it.

Its faults are easy enough to see, and even Marvelous seemed to be at least partly cognizant of them because of how many adjustments they made to the rereleases. In particular, Special Edition gives the gift tools special functions (or rather, makes them work as they were presumably intended to), cleans up and fleshes out the dialogue while adding new scenes, fills out the soundtrack and makes the record selection available without any gimmicks, reduces the cost of fertilizer and lets you make it yourself, adjusts the farming systems somewhat, lets you play with the dog, and lets you sell the damn goat, amongst other minor changes (literal or otherwise – we don’t talk about Lumina). It even cuts down on the number of in-game years because they likely realized the original was needlessly drawn out, but if you feel like that’s a bit too extreme, you can also continue to play past the ending this time around. All this in exchange for tanking the performance of the game, which strikes me as comical when I strain to think of what AWL was doing on the Gamecube that made running it on the PS2 impractical. Given you can iron out the performance issues by playing the game on modern hardware or through emulation, the most recent versions of the game seem like a marked improvement over the original… But the original is what I played, and it’s what plenty of people paid for back then. Nostalgia can only get you so far. I’d still much rather play 64 or Friends of Mineral Town or many of the others that came after. At bare minimum, there’s just a lot more going on in those games, but the unique aspects of A Wonderful Life aren’t compelling enough to draw me in either. The recent remake intrigues me, and I would like to see if a solid effort was put into revamping the Valley, but I just can’t justify dropping that kind of money when I know I’ll likely be disappointed. AWL has more shortcomings than a few QoL changes and content packs can completely iron out – and I’m not really counting on Marvelous to recognize that anyways.

Even still, there is something to be said for the darker and melancholier world presented in A Wonderful Life. It’s obvious that they were trying something a little different here, and even if they didn’t quite stick the landing, there’s unquestionably merit in the concept. One of the biggest shortcomings of the broader life sim genre, at least in my opinion, is that they seldom explore life as a whole, but only the part they want to focus upon. The “good” parts. A game where you explore all of the ups and downs of life - the innocence of childhood, the hard learning experiences that come with growing up, the struggle to make something of oneself as an adult and the challenges of getting old – there’s a ton of potential in something like that. I don’t know that Harvest Moon or Story of Seasons are ultimately suited to convey that experience, though. It did also have the benefit of being a bit mysterious with regards to its inner workings at a time where the Internet was still relatively fresh and new. I have consulted many guides as I played this game, and got conflicting information with almost all of them. Many aspects of the game are so poorly communicated that people have come up with all sorts of different ideas about the best way to plant crops, how often to fertilize them, about what kinds of events you can see and the benefits of befriending villagers, so on and so forth. It’s actually more remarkable how many things so many people seemed completely assured of despite being patently false. It was hard to find a guide that didn’t say you could get Carter’s chihuahua as a pet by befriending him and Flora, even though that’s utter nonsense. And in the spirit of being gracious, even for all of the complaints I have for how A Wonderful Life stacks up compared to other games of its kind, even the best of Harvest Moon’s offerings were far from being particularly complicated or deep experiences. It’s easy for me to be disappointed, but maybe the gameplay loop on offer here is more than enough for many of the series’ fans. Maybe the emotional twist is exactly what was missing from the other titles, and in that case, maybe A Wonderful Life is going to hit all of the right notes for somebody. That person just isn’t me.

I’ll definitely never forget Forget-Me-Not Valley. I’m just relieved to know my son will be starting a new life someplace kinder.